This invention relates to a method for manufacturing panty hose or the like and a circular knitting machine particularly suitable for carrying out this method.
One limitation of known methods for manufacturing panty hose or the like, formed from two legs and a panty portion, is their unsatisfactory adaptability to the person. In this respect, those methods in which the manufacture is in the form of a tube from one leg to the other have a panty portion of insufficient height and an imperfect adaptation at the crotch, while methods which manufacture the panty portion like a double heel, i.e. with a first half formed by narrowing and widening as by heel manufacturing and a second equivalent half, adapt themselves better to the person but also have height limitations which lead to an unsatisfactory product.
On the other hand, the more traditional manufacture, in which the fabric is formed in two separate halves to be sewn together, has the disadvantage of lengthy sewing of the parts. This disadvantage is the greater, the greater the number of parts to be sewn together, which may also be three or four because of the presence of central gussets. Moreover, the sewing is never carried out on completely straight parts and this makes sewing more difficult because of the difficulty in making the parts mate perfectly at each point.